Shadows of Fear -- Part 25
by Martin H Slusser

Blood seeped from under her nails. Leda’s head went back in a deep smile. This part she loved. Her hands opened, letting the knife drift down. The tip hovered just above the chest.

She sighed. Heat burst in her, sending a flood of passion down her inner thighs and she pushed the blade deep into the heaving chest.

The Cu’alani boy shrieked, “It’s eating me. It’s eating my heart.”

Owl waited in silence for the boy’s spirit to escape. The boy was strong, barely weakened by the night of rutting. He would last a while, until the knife sucked away the life force and the blood, leaving the skin draped over a skeleton, the skull a hollow shell.

The boy’s shrieks raised in agony and Leda rubbed a finger between her legs. A hard body pressed against her back. Tommy Drobnicki forced her legs apart and entered her with a hard shove.

The line wrapped halfway around a squat black and white streaked building, and they fidgeted, waiting their turn to enter.

Benny and Angie stepped into bright, glaring strobe lights and blaring music. Illegal. Most def’netly illegal. Bribes alone had to cost a small fortune. Mouth almost watering, Benny’s eyes widened in delight, watching other kids. A lot of them were younger than he was. They walk in and started dancing and passing weed around. The rank odor of weed and the musky stench of a mattress-strewn floor in the back room stunned him.

The place had a garish, cheap look, all of the opulent magnificence of a cathouse. Yet it was totally unlike the place in Fern Ridge. The old Victorian mansion was, according to old man Conners, a rare gem, the Victorian age was wood and brass and glass. It was the end of an era that bespoke quality.

The Manse was nothing like this. Too staid and orderly. Every moment of time there was set and scheduled and spied on by hidden cameras, even on the grounds.

No way the Manse could match the excitement and flash of this place. Not in Benny’s eyes.

A hand thumped Benny’s chest, slapping him out of a daze of exhilaration.

“Whoa, kid.”

A tall, barrel-chested man, his face marred by pocks and old scars smirked at Benny. A thinly rolled cigarette of foreign make hung from one corner of his mouth, the smoke easing up into the haze of the night. A strong odor of expensive cologne choked Benny. Feds loved to bathe in it. Hosts at the Manse called it cathouse cologne, and didn’t say it with much humor.

“I.D. y’know?” he said, his accent flat from too much marijuana and harshly New Jersey.

He tapped a manicured nail in the soft, smooth palm of his left hand. The knuckles, though, were as scarred and ugly as the man’s face. The cigarette shifted a fraction of an inch, moist lips thinning with impatience.

The cologne he wore and a cold, knowing amusement in the reptilian eyes made Benny bristle. The man gave Angie a slow, appreciative once over. He chuckled at Benny, derision plain on the scorn marred face. The doorman cleared his throat. One eyebrow raised, he glanced at Benny and slapped the bouncer on the shoulder.

The bouncer glared at Benny. He leaned over and squinted into Benny’s face, then shook his head.

“Nah. Can’t be.” The bouncer shook his head. “Asshole, nobody’s that stupid. Why would Grey be here? You got I.D.?”

Handing hers over for inspection, Angie threw a grin at Benny that made his stomach twist.

With a grunt of admiration for the artistry of the fake I.D., he passed it back. Seated next to the door at a card table, his partner took a green twenty from Angie, made change in a metal box, and tossed her a red five.

She slipped around the stiff, glowering Benny and squealed with excitement.

Bored, the bouncer reached for Benny’s.

Benny hesitated, giving the man a numbed look. The bouncer snarled, “Come on, kid.”

Shocked, Benny watched Angie disappear into bright streaks of laser lights flashing through a pall of oily smoke.

“You’re holding up traffic, Grey.”

The speaker was a kid from Mountain Top. Mike Daily? One of Donald’s. He spat on the sidewalk and poked Benny in the side. Benny twisted, glaring at Mike. Something in Benny’s eyes made the Daily kid step back.

Daily glowered. Grey was a sheep, a wimp. That was his rep.

Patting his pockets, Benny groaned. He had been in such a hurry to get to Freeland and Angie, he hadn’t even remembered his wallet.

In an effort to stall for time, Benny gave the apish bouncer a sloppy, asinine grin, adding for effect a slow, innocent blink while racking his mind for a way in. His I.D.s were gone. Carl destroyed them, then preceded to destroy him for blowing scarce money on what Carl called ‘nonessentials.’

The bouncer took a hard drag on the cigarette, disgust plain on the fleshy face. More than one way to skin a cat, though.

“Give me a dammed twenty.”

Benny gave a wry snort. He saw about as much gelt in his entire life as this guy took in during the worse hour on a bad night. Shoot, dude. Less. Any gelt hosts earned at the cathouse had gone, administrators claimed, into bank accounts in Mexico City and Switzerland. But mainly, Conn told him during their stay in protective custody at the Walnut Street pen, into the back pockets of politicians and those running the Project. Any earned at work schools in the reformatory went the same route and for the same reason. Politicians never look twice, so long as the green keeps rolling on in.

All he got was a check in his name every month out of his father’s military death benefits. But, because of his parole, that, too, went into a fund that he could draw on only for clothes, books, and things like that. No help from that quarter. The little money he earned working for Uncle Charlie went to Mom and Benny was proud he was old enough to contribute to home.

His parole officer even cut off the few bucks the stipend allowed for lessons at the North Wyoming Street dojo, up at Lake Hazleton. Sticos claimed Benny didn’t need to waste money on frivolity, what ever that was, and that him learning the Art would only get him in more trouble.

“No money, no party.” The bouncer snarled and spat his cigarette at Benny’s feet.

To hide the shame, Benny lowered his head. He gazed at the flashing strobe lights and Angie. All those kids inside. A lot of them were already getting naked. When he spotted some jerk with a hand on Angie’s tight end, Benny snarled and shoved past the bouncer.

The man roared a protest. He slapped one hand on the nape of Benny’s neck. The other snagged the baggy seat of his jeans. The bouncer turned, heaved, and tossed Benny out onto the dusty, coal-blackened sidewalk.

“Beat it, you butt-punk.”

The bouncer smiled with grim satisfaction, returning to the dazzling lights and scowling faces of well dressed Party members’ children waiting to enter. Shouts of laughter exploded around Benny.

Fighting the snarling fuse of his temper, Benny crawled to his feet. With cool snaps of his hands, he slapped black dust from his clothes. The fingers of one hand brushed a stinging spot on his elbow. Benny scowled. Blood seeped from a hard scrape.

Cocking his head, his lips twisted into what might be called a grin, but only because of all the teeth showing. Hair slid across his face, masked the rage of his eyes.

Angie’s head popped out the door. A crowd of men gathered and she looked miffed. Benny frowned. Probably because she wasn’t the reason for it.

Spotting Benny, she sniffed, her nose rising. Coldly, Angie surveyed the torn clothes, the blood dripping off his arm in a slow, steady spattering of crimson in the black dust of the sidewalk.

Dirt. Benny was covered in it. He belonged in it. She scowled.

“What Mother ever saw in the likes of you -” Remembering where she was, Angie bit off the words. Distaste flared into a humiliated loathing and contempt.

“Whore,” she said, smiling at a quick murmur of laughter. “Why don’t you just go home, Motor-head?” With a warm, welcoming smile at the doorman for his bark of laughter, Angie tossed her head in disdain and slid back into the crowded tavern.

“But . . . Angie -”

Confused and drowned out by the hard laughter of the two men and people in the line, his voice died.

“Angie,” Benny whispered, “You came with me.”

Shamed at her cut, and in front of all the kids from school, Benny slumped.

“Go home, sucker.” The doorman roared a laugh. The bounce spat on the sidewalk, adding to it, “Friggin hicks. Don’t youse know when a bimbo run a number on youse?”

Benny threw the leering faces a quiet snarl. A form of madness whispered in his veins. A chiste`. That’s what they thought of him. He hated being laughed at. His knife slid out. It came to his hand like water through a stream. It came naturally, with practiced ease.

Benny smiled a chilling show of teeth. The knife clicked open in the shocked and surprised faces. His voice was a mild, ironic whisper.

“Don’t leave home without it.”

He lunged.

Taken by surprise, all they could do was leap back.

Bounding in, he snaked his way through the mob.

He found her, a beer in one hand, a badly rolled joint, not a government medicinal issue, in the other.

Angie was in heaven. She could do this all night, let the roll go out time and again, never actually smoking it, letting the brewski go warm and stale, then tossing it.

Angel swore to never lose herself in anything again. She loved to be in control. Old man Ryan and his hard-core party animals taught her the hard way what happens to druggies and drunks. They whore for it. Angie shivered. With cool eyes, she surveyed her domain. Almost hearing the growls of desire coming from the men surrounding her, she smiled.

“Angel,” Benny shouted. He slammed his way to the middle of a pack of hungry-eyed boys.

Spinning Angie around by her arm, he snapped, “How about a place we both can go?” He said it again, shouting over the scream of music. Beer running over her hand she stared in disbelief. The opium-impregnated weed dropped from numbed fingers and shattered on the floor. Benny roared over the music, hoping, but knowing better. It wasn’t the noise that made her gape and tremble as his heart sank.

“How did you get in here,” she mouthed. Eyes stark with fury, she put a hand on his chest to stop Benny from embracing her. God, he even felt filthy and unkempt. His clothes were torn and rumpled, grimy from the bum’s rush.

His face was smeared and streaked with coal dirt, blood, and what looked like snot. The long dark hair was disheveled and mussed. He looked like something the cat refused to drag in and knew it, and being Grey, didn’t care.

Her hand was sending a different message. The muscles were iron hard, thick and heavy with no extra flesh. Wild with rage, Benny’s chest was heaving. Beyond all doubt, she knew why her stepmother wore a dreamy, far away look after that one weekend at the Manse. Here was a man. Oh, he still was boyish, with all of a boy’s impatience, but Angie was thrilled to the core of her being just by touching him.

Too bad it could never be. Donald, despite of all his faults, and they were, she knew, legion, was going to be somebody some day. Following Hillary Clinton’s example, she would be the one to put him there. For all his dark beauty Benny, was on his way to a purgatory of prison, not to some mansion. Unless he was headed back to the whorehouse.

Panic and horror ripped through Angie. Was she nuts? If the people who kidnapped Benny saw her with him, she was as good working on her back herself. Old man Ryan - If he saw them together the old goat would assume the worse.

“Look.” She stood on her toes and screamed it over the music and into that stupid male face. “I’m sick of you following me. I do not want to be seen with you. Nor any of your kind. Got it? Why don’t you go whore for my stepmother? She wants you.”

Dumfounded, Benny stared at Angie.

“What is it, Grey?” Balling her fists Angie pounded on his chest. “No spick der ingoleesh, you fucking asshole?” Angie gave an ugly laugh. “Get away from me, ‘breed. I don’t like dirty stinking injuns.”

Angie shoved hard with both hands. Taken by surprise, Benny stumbled back. Oblivious to the angry muttering as drinks spilled and toes were crushed under the solid heels of his boots, he stared back.

“Why?”

A shiver of desire snaked up Angie’s spine. She squelched it.

Fists clenching and twisting at the ends of swollen, rock hard arms, Benny roared, “You ask me to come, you pig.” He wanted to hurt her, to smash her too perfect, too cold face.

Controls burned mercilessly into his soul by the Project overpowered him. It still owned him, possessed his soul. He winced, rubbed the tiny, near invisible scar at the base of his skull. One hand crept to the faint, nagging scars on an otherwise well tanned neck where a training collar, the receiver for the microchip, had been locked.

Though long gone the collar choked him into submission. He was unable to ever hurt a woman. Unless she so requested or it was necessary for her safety.

Benny trembled, closed his eyes and fought it. It was gone, dammit. They opened it months ago. Right after the Arab’s trial. Information on how to remove the collar without turning the slaves into a quadriplegics was how Bellisario and his Soviet cohort escaped justice. But the microchip was still there, still attached to the nerve trunk. Still viable. Deadly. If forced out of conditioning, anything could happen. He could die. He could murder. Anything, when his brain was being eaten away by fire.

A cleansing rage filled Benny, washed out the fear and shame he lived with since the beginning of his life. All of it, rape, torture, slavery, all, crystallized into a cold hatred for Angie and her kind.

Breathing deep and ragged gasps, Benny stared with eyes no less cold than hers.

“Me a whore? What about you? How the hell you think old man Ryan paid me for working his freekin parties, Angie?”

Benny leaned close and each word rapped out loud and clear.

“He-gave-me-you.”

Before she had time to think her fist smashed into his face. Benny saw it coming and refused to duck. His head snapped around with the force of the blow.

Angie stared in horror as Benny’s head turned slowly back.

Face devoid of expression, Benny simply stared at the girl. A bright, clean scarlet trail of blood ran over his mouth and the tattered ruins of the tee shirt.

His head dropped forward, cocked to one side. He smiled.

An apology gibbering on her pink pretty lips, Angie backed away. With tears streaming down her face, smearing the heavy make-up, Angie promised her body, her soul, any perversion Benny wanted.

Anything. Anything. Just, please, don’t do what your eyes promise.

A grim smile tugged at full, bloodied lips.

“Take you? Take the one and only Angelica O’Brian?” he said, mocking her. Benny rasp, “I’d rather screw one of Uncle Charlie’s heifers. At least I’d know she was clean. But redskins ain’t into that kind of shit. So cats -” With bruising force the haft of his knife stabbed her between her breasts. “- Are out, too.” Blood and saliva filled his mouth. He spat it over her tooled leather boots.

Holding her breath, Angie whimpered, not daring to breathe. Benny rasp a curse at her and at himself for his stupidity. He spun, plowing across the silent, packed dance floor.

People melted out of Benny’s way. Those he knew, he snarled at and they stared in shock at the change.

A crushing blow on the back of the neck slammed Benny to the floor. The toe of a shoe gouged his ribs and slammed the breath from his lungs.

Rolling hard into the legs of the crowd, Benny tried to escape the bouncer. Scrambling up, Benny threw a hard right from the shoulder and howled with feral glee. With an audible ‘crunch,’ the bouncer’s nose collapsed under Benny’s fist, blood spurting down over the snarling mouth.

The huge bouncer smashed to the floor. He tried to rise on hands and knees. The steel toe of Benny’s boot took him under the chin.

The man sprawled onto his back, unable, or unwilling, to move.

The gaunt, colorless man at the door was busy taking money when saw his partner go down.

“I’m sick of this friggin place.”

Three times in the last year he was forced to move as Lake Wyoming slowly ate through collapsed mines and strip holes in what had been a large part of the Scranton area. Geologists feared that in a matter of a few decades the entire coal region from Scranton to West Virginia would be one vast mine acid-poisoned lake.

Curses erupted at the big man for assuming the short kid would be an easy roll. He slammed the steel box shut and leaped to his feet. Hesitating for just a moment, he felt for the blackjack taped under the table and ripped it out.

Coming in fast and low, he raised the blackjack and swung hard at the base of the kid’s head. Benny ducked. The lead caught him a glancing blow in the temple.

Crashing to his knees, Benny swung his head slowly, bear-like, in dazed confusion. The jack swung again and flattened him.

Benny forced himself onto all fours. He tried to rise, had to rise. Blood ran through his hair to dribble on the floor. With piercing eyes, he watched the doorman for a long moment, then smiled. A bunch of teens, mostly kids from White Haven and Freeland, roared.

            “Get up, Benny. Kill ‘em. Kill. Kill. Kill. Yeah.”

            For the first time in hours Gramps forced his voice through the block.

            Get the frik up, you idiot.

Unnerved, the man backed away. The kid was unnatural, spooky. He snarled, swung a threatening look around the tavern, glaring at kids who started cheering. He pulled back a leg.

“I’ll kick your friggin guts out.”

A hand came out of nowhere. Fingers gouged deep into the soft flesh and hard bone of the man’s groin. His eyes shot open, bulging at the grinning kid. Trembling hands clutched at the fist.

Benny uttered a small laugh and released him. Breath coming in soft gasps the doorman sank to the floor. Eyes blank, he stared at Benny, feeling nothing but the horror of damaged nerves. His mouth opened to plead for mercy and only hollow gasps came out.

In a slow motion that put Benny in mind of a tipped barrel, he fell still hunched over his groin, and thumped to the floor. Beer and vomit spewed out of his mouth.

The tavern’s head bartender growled. His eyes shifted. An ache grew at scrotum level. Benny saw him. He gave him a feral grin, wolfish and ruthless. Inviting.

Raising his fist, Benny held it before his face. Slowly, with infinite arrogance, it pushed at the man in a challenge that was unmistakable.

Wolf-power whispered at the bartender.

Taking a breath to steady his nerves, the bartender sniffed a finger. He ached for a taste of the white powder he indulged in as often as his wallet allowed.

He snatched a bat from under bar. The bartender shuddered. This wasn’t his job. Let Goon handle it. Even the Corpse, for crying out loud. Kids were laughing. Taking a deep breath, he leaped over swinging at the kid.

Cool and collect, Benny ducked under the bat. He came up face to face. Grabbing the man by the shoulders, he rammed his knee into the other’s stomach. Benny stepped back. The bartender folded. Just like Carl’s bro, Tony the Tiger, showed him, Benny took him by the ears and snapped a knee into the man’s face.

The bartender dropped, crashing in a wide sprawl. A choking cloud of coal dust spurted around him, settling rapidly as he bounced once then lay still. Carl hadn’t been to happy about being the guinea pig. Tony offered to talk about it and Carl backed off. Then both men laughed about it. A couple of grizzly bears, talking about tourist season and what seasoning to use on tourists, ja.

Inflamed with a raging crack of battle-lust, Benny did a quick Stomp Dance. He darted away, fists raised over a wild and grinning face. His gaze darted over the mob. They cringed from the force of power around him.

“Come on, you chickens,” Benny shouted. The music of the Atlantic City band Hard a’ Port swelled to applaud his efforts. Urged on by the music and the sweetness of freeing himself of the years of defeat and failure he needed more.

No one moved. Music whispered to a stop. A heavy silence pressed in. Fear thickened partiers’ blood.

Stunned at the savageness of the attacks and Benny’s fierce victory Angie was drawn to him. She stared at Benny with sharp hunger in her eyes, her body on fire, bursting with need. For him. Road warrior. That’s what her father called Benny and Carl, saying it with every ounce of contempt he could draw on.

Someone once said that men, real men, are little better than wild animals with a thin veneer of humanity over coiled steel.

Oh, baby, how right you are.

Angie sucked in a breath, smiled at Benny. No reason she couldn’t still marry Donny, and keep Benny in a little place for weekends. Who was going to hire an ex-con? He’d be grateful for some money and a place to live. It wasn’t like he would have to work very hard to earn it. Redskins were lazy trash. Certainly not as if he hadn’t done it before.

He looked at her. Faint with the heat, mind riotous with plans, she smiled again.

Animal.

Tiger.

A stallion.

She whispered it. Her body moved in a slow strut to claim him before another woman could. A musky wetness seeped from her.

“Animal.”

Her eyes devoured Benny. He was totally different from the cringing, terrified of returning to jail Benny she knew. Here he didn’t cower, nor glance in nervous jerks over his shoulder. Or sit, head down, slumped in shame.

“Animal.”

A delicious smile curved her lips. She reached for Benny. Reached out to possess him.

Benny’s lips curled in at the sight of Angie’s naked hunger.

He seized her starved, up-raised face with a bruising force that made Angie cry out in desire even as her body trembled in awe of pain. Would he beat her? It didn’t matter.

She protested, but mildly, with a faint whimper. He released her face, only to take her arm in a grip that brooked no argument, dragging her towards the doors.

“Please, Benny,” she cried. “Take me here. On the mattresses.” Angie pointed her free hand at the rear of the silent hall. Wary, naked kids lay in couples and in groups, watching them. She wanted them to see Benny in action. Let the girls spit in jealous rage when he took her to the stars of heaven. He was more than capable. Her stepmother’s sighs told Angie everything. “We can -”

Jerking her to him, Benny glared at her face, her pouting lips. She moved into his arms. Benny felt a jolt of desire so strong he was in pain.

Hard, pebbled nipples pressed again his chest, smearing the blood. For a moment he couldn’t breathe, his emotions at war. Her tongue swept a smear of blood from his chin.

“Slut.”

Shoving Angie from him, Benny spun on his heels and stalked away, leaving Angie sprawled on the floor.

She screamed, drumming her heels on the dusty planks. She saw contempt in the eyes of the other girls for letting Benny get away, for treating like dirt a man who was like Ivanovitch. A man who showed himself to be real and solid. A couple of girls from Hazleton Public High were angling Benny’s way. Angie slapped at the hands of her friends.

“If I can’t have him, nobody can. Not those peasants.”

Hands clawed, she jumped up and sprang at he back. She snatched at his head, reaching around, nails gouging his face.

The three men stumbled up, spitting out blood and teeth.

Wanting only to leave, to escape the sickened, trapped feeling the place gave him, Benny jerked out of Angie’s hands and stepped through the doors.

Shrieking hate, Angie pounced and clawed his eyes. He stumbled back, thrashing at her.

“Freekin bim. Let me the hell alone.”

Encircled, blinded by a red haze of his own blood, he tried to shove past the three. A pair of blackjacks hammered down, one on his arm, the other slamming onto his head. Benny slumped, shuddering in uncontrollable spasms.

The doorman and bouncer grabbed Benny’s arms, twisting them high on his back. The bartender knocked Angie away. He smashed at Benny with his fist, feet, and a blackjack.

Benny heaved, hissing and snarling. In the back of his mind a wolf howled. He crouched in their arms, leaped and managed to flip over behind them.

Benny collapsed, then bounded up and the men scattered with hard shouts.

He stood before them, blood running from wounds and claw marks. Awed, the three backed away in confused, grudging admiration.

All Angie could see was Benny getting away with making her look like a fool. She balled a fist and ran at Benny. One man caught her. He swung her around and threw her out onto the walk.

Behind Benny a kid sidled near, his face contorted with hate.

Fist raised, Benny shook the blood from his eyes.

“Just,” he gasp, “let me out.” Benny forced air deep into bruised lungs. “All I want is . . . to go home.”

The men glanced at Benny, then away. The kid was ready to collapse, but he stood solid. They backed from the door. Swallowing hard at the pain and nausea, Benny forced his legs to move.

Mike Daily snatched up a bar stool and swung it in a sharp arc down on the back of Benny’s head.

The men surged over Benny, pounding him to the floor.

Two Swords spotted a pack of imps gliding out of the walls and floor, eager to claim his kid’s body for the Owl. He bellowed a challenge and a-Heart-’a-Fire sang her war song. Two Swords wrench her from the harness on his back.

Battle madness took him. He attacked their demonic masters only to be knocked back by an avalanche of shrieking imps and dark-lords.

©2002 StoriesByEmail.com

Do It Yourself Web Host